Stevie Wonder, ‘Superstition’ and the Immersive Music Pioneers, Part 2

Fifty years before Atmos, Auro and RA360, Stevie Wonder’s classic “Superstition” was recorded and mixed using the original immersive music format. Here, industry legend Robert Margouleff recounts the process — don’t pass up Part 1!

MONITORING IN QUAD

For me, tracking in stereo provides a sound picture of the band standing on a stage in front of me, inside a proscenium arch, making the music objective, which was fine for recording a symphony orchestra. However, we were no longer listening from a distance with a third-person POV from the audience, with the soundstage in front of us. Listening in Quad made the audio subjective, with all of us occupying the same space as the music.

With Quad, the music’s POV was always in the first-person. There was a lead vocal in front of us, the background vocals behind us, guitar on the left, drums in front, the percussion behind, and perhaps doubled clavinet parts opposed at 180 degrees, to use one example. We could place the instruments around us in the speakers and listen to them “talk” to each other. Monitoring in Quad in the control room with Stevie made the recording process compelling and magical. It really tickled our HRTFs, and it changed my world!

The control room was small, but we had just enough space to place Stevie’s instrument stack in the center of the space, just behind the console. It consisted of a Fender Rhodes 88 with a Hohner Clavinet with a special bender bar on top, an Arp 2600, and an assorted collection of guitar boxes, including a MuTron Bi phaser and some other pedals.

We used an Ampex 440B 4-track tape recorder with a big power amplifier and a variable oscillator on the capstan motor for timing the echo, delay and eight channels of dbx noise reduction around it, with four in record and four in playback. We used this for our “delay effect” on our stereo version of “Superstition,” and four returning in mono when we were mixing in Quad, along with two EMT 140 echo plates (they were portable if you had four friends to move one). We worked hard to create a space without resorting to a lot of echo or reverb. We placed the music around Stevie, close and dry in real-time, and refined the directionality of the sound. This brought a different kind of emotional energy and awareness to the music.

Quad monitoring at a high level on those Hidley monitors in the control room proved to be an effective tool in getting the best possible performances out of Stevie. You could feel the sonic energy pounding your chest and moving through your body. It was like being on stage! It brought more emotional energy to the music, and since most of the sounds were electronic, they weren’t sounds until they tumbled out of the loudspeakers. Once we had the basics in the can, we used the studio to overdub acoustic instruments, drums, guitars, vocals, etc., and we also monitored in Quad.

We found ourselves living inside the song, and the control room became a musical instrument where people could perform together in the same space as the music. It was a musical instrument that you inhabited! Having the artist in the control room during the recordings was a gift. We could stay focused, hear what would go to tape, and make the EQ and effects changes on the fly while tracking—no back and forth between the studio and the control room between takes.

It was compelling and magical, and once I started listening to Quad like that, it changed my world forever! It started with Stevie and then continued years later with DEVO in 1980. The difference for DEVO was that I had the entire band, except the drummer Alan Myers, in the control room, monitoring in Quad during the recording process. It brought a kind of emotional awareness to the music. I still use that technique every chance I get.

IMMERSIVE AUDIO IS FOR EVERYONE

These days, with beds and objects and streaming music, we can put a “sound object” anywhere inside a 360-degree bubble and store it digitally. Our recordings are the native performances, and storing spatial information digitally is the big game-changer. With spatial audio on headphones, where a sound comes from can be a powerful and emotional part of the listening experience. We live with our music in a digital universe. Music is no longer a “take” or a “picture or a report” of a real-time event, but a mix of live and electronics that lives solely in the medium.

Immersive music is finally in the consumer market. People everywhere are experiencing it on mobile devices and headphones. In fact, I recently remixed DEVO’s hit single “Whip It” in Dolby Atmos, and I think it makes an excellent record even more enjoyable.

This technology will shape how music is composed and performed like never before. You’ll often hear me say, “Technology drives the art,” because it’s always done that for me. I believe that the ability to create and deliver immersive music will inspire artists and producers the way that mixing “Superstition” in QS did for Stevie, Malcolm and myself more than 50 years ago.

Please stop thinking in stereo. Use immersive as a composing and recording tool, and mind your HRTFs!

Robert Margouleff is a record producer, synthesizer pioneer and Grammy Award-winning engineer known for his co-producing and programming on Stevie Wonder’s classic albums Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale.